Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Robust and Heavy-Tailed Mean Estimation Made Simple, via Regret Minimization

STCS Student Seminar
Speaker: Santanu Das (TIFR)
Organiser: Ratnakar Medepalli
Date: Friday, 7 Mar 2025, 16:00 to 17:00
Venue: A-201 (STCS Seminar Room)

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Abstract: 
Robust mean estimation for high-dimensional data in the presence of adversarial corruption is a well-studied problem in robust statistics. In this talk, we present an algorithm that tackles robust mean estimation by first reducing the problem to a meta-problem, and reformulating the original task into a framework that isolates the key statistical properties. Once the meta-problem is established, we employ a multiplicative weight update method to solve it. This computationally efficient iterative approach reweights the data points based on their consistency with the current estimate, effectively diminishing the influence of corrupted samples
 

The talk is based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.15839.